Abstract/Summary

This article contributes to a dialogue between current decolonizing insights and the history of insects. It focusses on mosquitoes— miniscule vectors of spectacular diseases. Whilst foregrounding the prominence of the colonized in shaping the history of mosquitoes in South Asia, this article combines three distinct lines of decolonizing scholarship that are usually pursued independently of one another: critique of colonial knowledge; examination of anticolonial articulations of the colonized; exposé of how the post-colonial state inherits and reinforces atrocious colonial precedents. It enables the current decolonizing agenda to offer a critique of state power across chronological periods and political regimes.